The traffic was heavy on both sides of the safety island where he had emerged from the subway. Blinded by the headlights every time he tried to cross, Gregory stood helplessly at the curb. Before long a taxi pulled up, the driver assuming that he was waiting for a cab. The door opened. Gregory got in and mechanically uttered his address. When the taxi began moving he noticed that he was still clutching the photograph in his hand.
About ten minutes later the taxi came to a stop at the corner of a small street just off Odd Square. Gregory got out, already half-convinced that he had experienced a hallucination of some kind. Sighing, he stuck a hand in his pocket and fumbled for his keys.
The house in which he lived was owned by the Fenshawes. It was an old, two-story building, with an entrance portal almost monumental enough for a cathedral; a steep, gabled roof; thick, dark walls; long hallways abounding in sudden turns and hidden alcoves; and rooms so high they seemed to have been designed for some kind of flying creature. This suggestion was reinforced by the extraordinary wealth of ornamentation on the ceilings. With its high gilded vaults in a constant state of semidarkness due to an effort to save electricity, its broad marble staircases, wide-columned terrace, mirrored drawing room with chandeliers copied from those of Versailles, and its huge bathroom (which was probably once a parlor) — the house had a strange splendor, and it was this that had fired Gregory’s imagination when, accompanied by his new colleague, Kinsey, he had first seen it.
And since the Fenshawes had made a good impression on him, he decided to take his colleague’s advice and rent the room, which Kinsey was giving up, or so he said, for personal reasons.
Unfortunately, the Victorian architects who designed the house hadn’t known anything about modern home appliances, and as a result the place presented a number of inconveniences. To get to the bathroom Gregory had to walk the length of a long hallway and through a glassed-in gallery; to get to his room from the stairs he had to pass through a six-doored drawing room which was almost unfurnished, not counting a few blackening bas-reliefs on the peeling walls, a crystal chandelier, and the mirrors in each of its six corners. After a while, though, the house’s defects didn’t seem too serious.
Since he led a very busy life, returning home late at night and spending the whole day at work, it was a long time before Gregory noticed how peculiar his new residence was; nor did he realize, at first, how much he was being drawn into its orbit.
The Fenshawes were well on in years, but growing old gracefully. Pale and thin, with colorless, slightly graying hair, Mr. Fenshawe was a melancholy man who, because his nose looked as if it had been borrowed from a different, considerably more fleshy face, gave the impression of being in disguise. He favored old-fashioned clothing, usually wore brilliantly polished shoes and a gray frock coat, and, even at home, always carried a long cane. His wife was a dumpy woman with small, dark, shining eyes. She walked around in dark dresses that bulged strangely (after a while Gregory began to suspect that she was puffing herself out on purpose), and she was so taciturn that it was difficult to remember the sound of her voice. When Gregory asked Kinsey about the owners, the answer had been, “Don’t worry, you’ll get along with them,” followed, a moment later, by, “They’re such riffraff.” At the time Gregory had only wanted some support for his decision to move into the big, old house, so he didn’t pay much attention to this mysterious remark, the more so because he was accustomed to Kinsey’s penchant for bizarre expressions.
The morning after he moved in Gregory encountered Mrs. Fenshawe for the first time. It was quite early. Striding along on his way to the bathroom, he came upon her in the drawing room. She was sitting on a low stool that looked as if it had been made for a child, a rag clutched in one hand, some kind of sharpened metal implement in the other. Using her feet to hold back a section of carpet, she was buffing the parquet flooring, working her way along the length of the room, but making such slow progress that she had moved less than two feet by the time Gregory came back from the bathroom, finding her as busy and preoccupied as before. In the middle of the huge drawing room, she looked like the black head of a slowly contracting caterpillar whose body was formed by the patterned rug. When Gregory asked if he could help with anything, Mrs. Fenshawe turned her leathery face in his direction for a moment but didn’t say a word. That afternoon, on his way out of the house, Gregory tripped over her as she was moving from step to step on her little stool (the lights were off), nearly knocking her down the stairs. From time to time thereafter he ran into her in the most unlikely and unexpected places, and when he was working in his room he sometimes heard the slow, measured creaking of her stool as she made her way along the hall. Once, when the creaking stopped just opposite his door, he assumed, with some distaste, that his landlady was spying on him through the keyhole. He quickly stepped into the hall, but Mrs. Fenshawe, who was fastidiously polishing the parquet under the window, ignored him completely.
Gregory concluded from all this that Mrs. Fenshawe was trying to save money by cutting down on domestic help; she used the stool because it was uncomfortable for her to bend over. This explanation, though presumably correct, did not eliminate the problem, however, because the constant sight of Mrs. Fenshawe creeping along on her stool, and the perpetual creaking from dawn to dusk, soon took on a demonic character in Gregory’s mind. He began to yearn for the moment when the creaking would stop; sometimes he had to wait an hour or two to get some peace. Moreover, Mrs. Fenshawe was usually accompanied by two black cats, which to all appearances she took care of, and Gregory, for no apparent reason, couldn’t stand either of them. At least a dozen times he told himself that none of this was any of his business, and in fact if it hadn’t been for Mr. Fenshawe he would have been able to ignore everything that went on outside his room.
Although the old man’s room was right next door to his and shared the same beautiful terrace, Gregory never heard a sound from Mr. Fenshawe in the daytime. The nights were a different story. Well after ten o’clock, sometimes not until after eleven, Gregory would hear a rhythmic knocking from behind the wall separating the two rooms. Sometimes it was a rich, sonorous sound; sometimes hollow and dull, like someone tapping on a wooden wall with a hammer. This was usually followed by several other acoustical phenomena. At first it seemed to Gregory as if these came in an infinite number of variations, but he was wrong, and within a month he was able to recognize the eight most frequent sounds.
The initial knocking behind the wall was usually followed by a dull, empty noise, rather like the sound of a small barrel or a piece of wooden pipe being rolled along a bare floor. Sometimes there were some quick vigorous thumps on the floor, as if someone were walking barefoot with his full weight on his heels. Other times there was clapping — heavy, mean-sounding slaps like those an empty hand might make against a moist balloon-like surface filled with air. There was an intermittent hissing sound also and, finally, some faint noises that were difficult to describe. A persistent scraping, interrupted by a metallic rapping, then by a sharp flat whack like the sound of a fly swatter, or like the tightly wound string of a musical instrument being snapped.
These sounds followed each other in no particular order, and, with the exception of the soft thumps, which Gregory characterized to himself as barefoot stomping, some of them might even be missing for several evenings in a row. Always performed with a certain amount of technical finesse, the sounds increased steadily in tempo, and once they began one could always look forward to a serenade of the most unusual richness and pitch. The sounds and murmurs were usually not very powerful, but to Gregory, lying under his cover in a dark room and staring at a high, invisible ceiling, it sometimes seemed as if they were loud enough to shatter his brain, and in time his interest in the sounds changed from simple curiosity to an almost pathological obsession, although, since he didn’t go in for self-analysis, he would have been hard put to say just when this change took place. It may be that Mrs. Fenshawe’s peculiar behavior during the daytime made him o
versensitive to the miseries he had to endure every night. At the beginning, though, he was so busy with a case that he couldn’t worry very much about all this, and in any event, because he was so busy he slept well and hardly heard anything. After several nights of the noises, however, his dark room began to feel like an echo chamber. Gregory tried to convince himself that Mr. Fenshawe’s nocturnal activities were none of his business, but by then it was too late.
Next Gregory tried rationalizing. Faced with a collection of weird, incomprehensible sounds that no one ever mentioned, he attempted to work out a logical explanation of some kind that would cover everything. This, he soon discovered, was impossible.
Where once he had always slept like a log, dropping off as soon as he hit the sheets, and listening to the complaints of insomniacs with a polite attitude that verged on disbelief, now, in the Fenshawe house, he began to take sleeping pills.
Every week, Gregory had Sunday dinner with his landlords. The invitation was always extended to him on the preceding Saturday. On one of these occasions he managed to sneak a look into Mr. Fenshawe’s bedroom, but he regretted this immediately because what he saw exploded his elaborately constructed theory that his landlord was conducting a complicated scientific experiment. Except for a huge bed, a chest of drawers, a night table, a sink, and two chairs, the bright triangular room was empty. There wasn’t a sign of tools, wooden boards, balloons, metal containers, or kegs. There weren’t even any books.
The Sunday dinners were usually quite dull. The Fenshawes were conventional people who lifted their convictions and opinions from the pages of the Daily Chronicle; they rarely had anything original to say, and their conversation generally centered on repairs the old house needed and the difficulty of raising money to pay for these, along with a few anecdotes about some distant relatives in India who apparently comprised the more exciting branch of the family. All this was so trite and commonplace that any mention of the night sounds, or of Mrs. Fenshawe’s processions around the house on her stool, would have been out of place; in any event, whether or not this was actually so, Gregory could never quite manage to say anything about these matters.
Afterward, Gregory would tell himself that it was a waste of time to worry about any of this: if he could only think the matter through, or at least formulate a reasonable theory about what his neighbor was doing behind their mutual wall in the middle of the night, he told himself, he would finally be free from the agonizing hours of tossing sleeplessly in a dark, lonely room.
But the idea of making sense out of a series of weird, disjointed sounds floated around in Gregory’s head as if in a void. Once, somewhat groggy from a sleeping pill which had made him drowsy without bringing rest, he quietly slipped out of bed and went out on the terrace, but the glass doors to Mr. Fenshawe’s room were covered from the inside with a heavy, nontransparent curtain. Gregory returned to his room shivering from the cold and, feeling like a whipped dog, he slipped under the covers, overcome with gloom because he had tried to do something for which he would always be ashamed.
Gregory’s work kept him so busy that he rarely thought about the noises during the daytime. At most, he was reminded of them once or twice when he bumped into Kinsey at Headquarters. On these occasions Kinsey always eyed him expectantly, with an air of cautious curiosity, but Gregory decided not to bother him about it. After all, in the long run the problem was trivial. In time, perhaps without even realizing it, Gregory gradually began to change his routine: he brought official reports home and brooded over them until midnight, sometimes even later. This enabled him to lie to himself about the ultimate disgrace that was already so close, for during his long hours of sleeplessness, the most extraordinary ideas were coming into his head, and several times he had conceived a desperate desire to just give up and take refuge in a hotel or a boardinghouse.
This evening more than ever, returning from Sheppard’s, Gregory needed peace and quiet. The alcohol had worked its way out of his system long before, although he still felt angry and had a pungent taste in his mouth, and his eyes smarted painfully as if there were sand beneath the lids. The staircase, immersed in darkness, was deserted. Gregory passed quickly through the drawing room, where the dark mirrors glistened coldly in the corners, and closed the door of his room with a sigh of relief. Out of habit — it had already become almost a reflex — he stood perfectly still for a moment, listening. At such times he didn’t think; his behavior was instinctive. The house was as still as death. Gregory turned on a lamp, noticed that the air in the room was heavy and stuffy and flung open the door to the terrace, then set about making coffee in his little electric pot. He had a splitting headache. Earlier in the evening other things had distracted him, but now the pain came up to the surface of his consciousness and demanded his full attention. He sat down on a chair next to the bubbling pot, but the feeling that he had just gone through a lousy, unlucky day was so inescapable that he had to stand up. Relax, he told himself, nothing really awful had happened. He’d been given the slip by a man on the subway who vaguely resembled one of the missing corpses. Sheppard had put him in charge of the very investigation he wanted to command. True, the Chief had babbled strangely for a while, but in the end it was all only words, and Sheppard was certainly entitled to carry on if he wanted to. Maybe he was getting religious in his old age. What else had happened? Gregory reminded himself of the incident in the dead-end arcade — the meeting with himself — and laughed involuntarily. “That’s the detective in me… Ultimately, even if I bungle this case, nothing will happen,” he thought. He took a thick notebook out of his drawer, turned to a blank page, and began writing: “MOTIVES: Greed. Religious Fervor. Sex. Politics. Insanity.”
Glancing back at what he had written, Gregory crossed out each item on the list except “Religious Fervor.” What a ridiculous idea! He threw the notebook aside and leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. The pot was bubbling viciously now. Maybe his silly little list of motives wasn’t so stupid after all, he reflected. A frightening idea began to work its way to the surface. Gregory waited passively, gloomily beginning to feel like a struggling, helpless insect trapped in an incomprehensible darkness.
Shivering, he got up, walked over to his desk, and opened a bulky volume entitled Forensic Medicine to a place indicated by a bookmark stuck between the pages. The chapter heading read, “The Decomposition and Decay of the Corpse.”
He began reading, but after a while, although his eyes obediently continued to follow the text, his mind began to visualize Sheppard’s room with its gallery of dead faces. He pictured the scene: Sheppard pacing back and forth in an empty house, stopping occasionally to take a look at the pictures on the wall. Shivering again, Gregory made a decision: Sheppard was a prime suspect. Suddenly he heard a shrill whistle and realized that the coffee was ready.
Closing the book, Gregory got up, poured himself a cup, and gulped it down while standing at the open door of the terrace, not even noticing that the hot coffee was burning his throat. A hazy glow hung over the city. He could see far-off cars shooting along the nighttime streets, looking, in the distance, like white flashes disappearing into a black abyss. From inside the house there was a faint rustling. It sounded a little like a mouse eating its way through the wall, but Gregory knew it wasn’t. Feeling as if he had lost even before the game really started, Gregory ran out on the terrace. Supporting himself on the stone balustrade, he raised his eyes upward. The sky was full of stars.
3
That night Gregory had a dream in which everything became crystal clear and he cracked the case, but in the morning he couldn’t remember a single detail. Part of it came back to him while he was shaving. He was at a shooting gallery in Luna Park firing a big red pistol at a bear. He’d just scored a bull’s-eye when the bear growled and reared up on its hind legs; suddenly it wasn’t a bear at all but Doctor Sciss, very pale and wrapped in a dark cloak. When Gregory took aim, the pistol became as soft as a piece of rubber. He kept pressing his finger aga
inst the place where there should have been a trigger even though it didn’t do any good. That was all he could remember. When he finished shaving, he decided to phone Sciss and arrange a meeting. On his way out of the house he saw Mrs. Fenshawe in the hall, rolling up a long carpet runner. One of the cats was curled up under her stool. Gregory could never tell the cats apart, although he could see the differences between them when they were together. After a quick breakfast in a cafeteria on the other side of the square, he telephoned Sciss. A woman’s voice at the other end told him that Sciss had left London for the day. This ruined Gregory’s plan. Uncertain what to do next, he went out into the street, strolled around for a while gazing at the store windows, and then, for no reason at all, spent an hour wandering through Woolworth’s. Around twelve o’clock he left Woolworth’s and finally checked in at Scotland Yard.
It was Tuesday. Making a mental note of the number of days still remaining in the period Sciss had specified, Gregory skimmed through a sheaf of reports from the outlying suburbs, carefully went over the latest weather information and the long-range forecasts for southern England, chatted for a while with the typists, and arranged to see a film that evening with Kinsey.
After the film he was still at a loss for something to do. He most definitely did not want to spend any more time in his room studying Forensic Medicine, not from laziness but because the pictures always upset him, although naturally he’d never admit that to anyone. There was a long wait ahead; he knew it would pass more quickly if he could find an interesting diversion, but it wasn’t easy. After killing some time by compiling a long list of books and old issues of Archives of Criminology to borrow from the department library someday, he went to his club to watch a soccer game on television, then read for a few hours at home, finally falling asleep with the feeling that the day had been a total waste.
The Investigation Page 6
